An unassuming ambassador of the Italian cuisine in Melbourne

Luisa Valmorbida is the current “Delegata” or president of the Melbourne branch of the Italian Academy of Cuisine, a role she took on more than 18 months ago. Raffaele Caputo interviewed her about the history of the Academy in Melbourne and her innovative ideas on how to enhance knowledge and appreciation of the Italian cuisine.

I knew about
the Academy for a long time. My parents would go to Vicenza and some of their
friends, who were part of the Vicenza chapter, would invite them to go along to
the convivi as dinner parties of
Academy members are called. I can remember them telling me about one dinner in
particular and about a man called Giovanni Capnist, who was from Vicenza. I
don’t really know much about him but he was head of the Vicenza Delegation and
at that time had written a book on mushrooms [I funghi nella cucina Veneta, 1984]. I had met him with my parents
and I remember him telling me that he had been to Australia and that we have so
many edible mushrooms here, ones that nobody really knows about. But to get
back to your question, it was back in the mid-80s that I first heard about the Accademia through my parents going back
to Vicenza.

How did the
Academy start up in Melbourne?

Again, it
was because of Giovanni Capnist. He wasn’t only Delegato of the Vicenza chapter, he was also president of the
national body, which has its headquarters in Milan. It was a couple of years
after that trip back to Vicenza that Capnist approached my father, Carlo
Valmorbida, to head a delegation here in Melbourne. My father gave it some
thought but was very involved in his business and graciously declined the offer.
But he said to Capnist, ‘Why don’t you ask Luigi Di Santo [of Enoteca Sileno]?’
Capnist did and Di Santo accepted and so the first delegation of the Accademia Italiana della cucina in
Australia was formed in Melbourne in 1989.

What does it
mean to be a member of the Italian Academy of Cuisine?

Every year a
book is published by the headquarters in Milan, which is not a restaurant
guide. The Accademia does bring out a
restaurant guide, both online and in print, and a monthly magazine to which
delegates from around world contribute reviews of restaurants as well as
reports and ratings of their convivi (members’
dinner parties). But that’s not what I am talking about. The book I’m referring
is called “The Carnet”. It has details
of every member of every delegation around the world. There are 218 delegations
in Italy, 78 delegations outside of Italy, and over 7,300 members worldwide.
So, lets say you go to Chile and want to go to an Italian restaurant there.
Well, you can get in touch with a member in Chile and they’ll advise you where
to go. Or, lets say you are in New York, you can ring a delegate there and ask
whether there is an Accademia dinner
planned while you’re there, and if there is, then you’re invited. What this
means is that if you’re a member in Melbourne, then you’re also a member
worldwide.

How did you
get involved?

I got
involved because of another president of the Accademia, Prof. Giuseppe Dell’Osso, a surgeon, who came out to
Melbourne with his wife. As a friend of Antonio Zeccola [Palace Films], who was
president of the Melbourne delegation at the time, I was invited to a dinner
Antonio had at his house to meet him. This president in turn invited me to come
to a convivio at Florentino’s the
following night. I went along to that and sat next to him and he was a very
charming man. He too knew Giovanni Capnist well. Then he asked me, ‘Why aren’t
you a member?’ That was when I decided to become a member. After a few years
Antonio asked me to be his vice president.

And you then
took over from Antonio Zeccola?

No, when
Antonio felt it was time for him to resign as president, I was happy to stay on
as vice delegata while someone else
took up the role as president as I was too busy at work to devote a lot of time
to it. After that Miro Gerjia became the Delegato
for a number of years. When Miro left and I became Delegata, it was becoming more and more difficult to get people to
attend our convivi and I felt that it
was necessary to add a little more to our dinners and not necessarily make them
all fine dining experiences as they can be so limiting and boring.

For example,
a few years ago I was staying with friends at a villa in the countryside near
Florence, and there was a restaurant up in the hills not far from our villa,
which was recommended to us by the delegation in Florence. We drove up there
and we were really surprised because this restaurant was basically a baracca [a shack] with a few tables. Yet
we had a really great meal there. The meat was beautifully grilled, and the
vegetables were all seasonal and cooked perfectly. Everything was cooked in the
style of ‘cucina povera’, just as the
locals would have cooked at home.

I’ve tried
to include smaller family-run restaurants, pizzerias, and dinners at the local
Italian clubs as well as fine dining establishments in the convivi we’ve had recently.

I’ve noticed
that the events have grown in popularity since you took over. There have been
at least three dinner parties that I could not attend because they were fully
booked.

There was a
period of limbo after Antonio resigned where it looked like we were begging
people to come to our dinner parties, but now we’re actually turning people
away. People are ringing me asking if they can bring friends along, and that’s
great because it’s about getting new members and if you get new members then
they invite more people.

How do you
decide where to go or what theme to do?

There is a
group of consiglieri to which I send
an email asking for suggestions for the coming year, asking if they’ve been to
any interesting Italian restaurants. They offer their suggestions and I usually
go out and try these restaurants, and then I‘ll just organise the evening.

The problem
I find sometimes is that I’ll go to a restaurant and I’ll have an entrée, main
course, dessert and a bottle of wine and it might cost me $100, but when I
approach the restaurant and say I’ve a group of people who want to come, all of
a sudden the three courses become five or six and $100 becomes $180. That
irritates me. I can understand that the restaurants want to showcase the best
food on their menu, but that food is usually the richest and most complicated
and can be a too expensive and too much to eat.

I also find
sometimes that no restaurateur wants to give you vegetables, even a salad, yet
most great regional Italian cuisine is based on using and cooking fresh
vegetables. I would love to organise a convivio
at a vegetarian restaurant, or at least one that bases its menu on vegetables.
It’s not that the Accademia shuns hauté cuisine but, as I said before, we
can have a convivio in a baracca and I don’t care, as long as the
food is good, genuinely Italian and it’s a good experience.

In your
view, what is the Accademia about?

For me it’s
mostly about education otherwise all we are doing is just going out to dinner.
I think it’s important for the Accademia
to be critically appreciative but not to denigrate the restaurants we attend.
Everyone in Australia loves Italian food, so for me it’s about putting together
programs where restaurateurs are given feedback that help to raise the
bar a little bit, and members learn more about regional specialities,
and it’s about keeping traditional Italian food and wine alive around the
world. The Accademia has to offer
more than just going out to dinner with a group of people. If you want people
to belong to your events, if you want the people who have come along once to
come again, then you have to offer something they can take home, such as a
recipe, an experience and some know-how about the food they have eaten.

What are
some of the events planned that reflect the direction you’d like to take the Accademia?

Well, a
salami and salsicce making event is
always good, and for this year we are going to Costante in Preston. it’s a
great shop with all the bits and pieces for salami and sausage making, wine
making, pasta making, and for making pizza. It’s a fascinating place. And at
the back they have a room cued up for making sausages and salami. I went there
and did the salami-making course and it was great.

Another
event I’m about to organise is one on Italian cheeses and salumi. I’ve met a local importer of fine Italian cheeses and salumi and he also wholesales the best
locally made products. He runs cheese and salumi
appreciation classes. I would like him to come as part of an Accademia dinner, so that we taste and
listen to the origins of the food and how they’re made and where they come
from: have the salumi as antipasto,
have a main and then follow with cheese tasting, and with accompanying wines.

Of course,
it’s impossible to do these types events all the time, but people love it when
you do, because they’re learning something as well as having a great dining
experience. I’ve also been asked by our local group to organise a tour of
Italy, incorporating dinners with delegations in the cities we visit. We’d be
able to taste local food and meet with people from all over Italy. It sounds like
a wonderful idea, but a lot of work!